Everyone knows that you can’t tell an Albertan from an Ontarian just by looking at them. But can you tell them apart from their accents?

Experts will tell you that there’s a remarkable homogeneity to Canadian accents considering the vast distances that divide the country. Our speech is similar in ways that would be unthinkable in places like the U.K. and Europe, where dialects transform completely in the space of a few kilometres.

Perhaps it’s because the linguistic differences between us are so subtle that we debate them so ferociously. We wear each minor point of contention like some kind of badge of honour: It’s pronounced “milk” not “melk”! It’s a “cabin” not a “cottage”!

We really can’t help ourselves. Like complaining about the weather, debating the finer points of our accents and regional vernacular has become something of a national pastime. But is there really such a thing as an Albertan or Western accent?

The Calgary actor honed the voice and mannerisms of his celebrated Fubar alter ego, Terry Cahill, while working as a welder’s helper on a pipeline project. “Some of the funnier characters that I met were the slackers, the half-assed guys,” he recalls. “Their attitude in life translated into the way they spoke, which was sort of slow, kind of lazy, not really enunciating.”

Lawrence kept a notebook and wrote down some of the goofy things he heard. An early iteration of the film’s now iconic edict to “just give’r” came from the mouths of his crewmates.

While the Fubar characters were inspired by real Albertans, Lawrence admits that the accents were exaggerated for comic effect. “It’s more of a roller coaster than the average Albertan accent,” Lawrence says, “like a merry-go-round and we tried to crank it up and down.”

Charles Boberg is a fan of Fubar. The McGill linguistics professor owns both films on DVD, has written about them in his book The English Language in Canada: Status, History and Comparative Analysis, and credits Lawrence and co-star Paul Spence with (f-bombs aside) generally nailing the phonetic patterns of pronunciation characteristic of what he calls “Prairie English.” (Broadly speaking, Boberg says Canadian speech can be broken down into six major phonetic groups: British Columbia, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec (Montreal), the Maritimes, and Newfoundland.)

“The Fubar characters definitely represent the kind of English I grew up hearing around me in Edmonton from a certain class of people, if you know what I mean,” Boberg says. “Like the stereotype of Minnesota speech in the movie Fargo, the Fubar sound may be a little exaggerated for comic effect, but it’s definitely grounded in reality.”

Boberg tells a story about a drama instructor at the University of Alberta who swore he could tell Edmontonians and Calgarians apart based on their accent. The instructor would even imitate the Calgary accent, claiming it sounded “more American.”

“I don’t think there was any basis for that claim. I think it rested on non-linguistic ideas about Calgary vs. Edmonton, Cowtown vs. Oil City, and the idea that Calgary would intuitively be more American.”

So Boberg doesn’t believe there’s a discernible Calgary accent, but he does say that “there are things we can say about the Prairies, as a region, which distinguishes them clearly from Ontario and, to some extent, even from B.C.”

Out and about

Boberg says there are a number of subtle flags that point to Prairie speech. One of the defining characteristics of almost all Canadian speech is our tendency to “raise” the vowels before non-voiced consonants in words like “out,” “about,” “house” and “south.”

It’s so pervasive that the phenomenon has been named for us: Canadian raising. You can hear it when you read a list of words with and without raising side by side:

Raised Non-raised

Lout vs. Loud

House (noun) vs. House (verb)

Couch vs. Gouge

Write vs. Ride

Tight vs. Tide

It’s so subtle, most Canadians don’t notice they’re doing it, but to American ears it’s a dead giveaway that you’re a Canuck. Canadian actors and broadcasters working in the U.S. have to train the raising out of their speech.

Canadian Raising isn’t uniform across the country, however. When Americans make fun of the way Canadians pronounce “about,” it’s usually mocking a more Eastern or Ontarian pronunciation, where the word sounds something like “a-beh-oot” (where the first part of the vowel is pronounced like the vowel in “bed.”)

Prairie speakers are guilty of something similar, but the sound is subtler, less fronted in the mouth, and more like “a-boat.”

You betcha!

Prairie speech is also notable for taking on a more Midwestern flavour, à la Fargo, with fixed, pure-sounding vowels in words like “lake” and “boat.”

“Those really monophthongal vowels, ‘oh’ and ‘eh’, are exactly what they make fun of in that famous film Fargo,” Boberg says.

Bar stars

Westerners pronounce the “ar,” not the “r” in words like “car,” “star” and “bar.”

In Ontario, and especially in the Maritimes, the word “car” would be brighter and pronounced nearer to the front of the mouth with more emphasis on the “r”— more like “kerr.”

p>Nasal Ontarians

Westerners visiting Ontario will often notice more nasal-sounding vowels. You can hear the difference in the way Ontarians pronounce words like “man,” “hand,” “lamp” and “Canada.”

In Ontario, the word “man” sounds closer to “may-ann” than it does in Calgary.

Migrating vowels

Albertans often raise the vowels before “g,” so words like “stag” and “bag” sound more like “stayg” and “bayg.”

Linguistics professor Nicole Rosen has been recording the voices of rural Albertans for the last few years and believes that while Calgarians may not have a discernible accent, there are highly distinctive linguistic groups to be found on the Prairies.

Rosen says local dialects, or “ethno-lects,” created by First Nations communities and religious colonies or groups like the Hutterites, Mennonites and Mormons have flourished in rural parts of the province.

When she worked at the University of Lethbridge, Rosen said it was easy to pick out a “Mormon drawl” in some of her students who identified as “LDS” (i.e. belonging to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).

“I think there’s a big difference in speech between cities and rural areas in Canada—way more than there’s a difference between cities. Winnipeg and Calgary are a lot more similar than Calgary and Cardston,” Rosen says.

And where you live is just one facet of what shapes your accent, says Rosen. Age, gender and socio-economic status all play a part. Women, by and large, speak more correctly or formally than men, and young people, especially teenagers, are the drivers of change in language.

What really excites Rosen are the grey areas of language where dialects change or grammatical rules are thrown over. “I was in Toronto and I heard somebody on the subway saying ‘youse guys,’ and I turned around because that’s from home. I don’t say ‘youse’ but most of my relatives do,” says Rosen, who was raised in Manitoba.

People are constantly deviating from what we’re taught is the correct way to speak, Rosen says. “You won’t find it in a grammar book, but there’s nothing wrong with it. If you spoke the way you were taught in school around your friends and family, you wouldn’t have any friends left.”

In many cases, the slight deviations in pronunciation or regional slang for everything from pizza toppings to running shoes are what help people feel like they belong in a place.

Boberg argues that this sense of belonging is becoming increasingly valuable in our globalized world where traditional markers of identity have died out. “The one thing that does continue to distinguish people is local speech. You can still tell whether someone is from the South or New York City or Western Canada based on the way they speak,” he says. “It’s the basic need of identity, to know who we are in the larger cultural landscape... If you can tell people something about what makes them Albertans, or Western Canadians, as opposed to Americans or Ontarians, then that is going to be immensely satisfying to people on some level.”

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The Canucks' Speech: What does it mean to talk with an Alberta accent?

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